There is hardly another adventure-thriller novel in modern literature, so generously saturated with reflections on the structure of our world, as Yann Martel’s novel `Life of Pi`, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2003. The amazing story of the coexistence of an Indian teenager and a Bengal tiger on board a lifeboat drifting for nine months in the Pacific Ocean is the main content of the novel. The kind of relationship that gradually develops between beast and man cannot be called either friendship or affection. It is a strange bond on several levels at once – practical and subconscious, instinctive and volitional.

To get out of the cage of consciousness, one must at least swing its bars. Yann Martel’s epic-philosophical allegory accomplishes this task brilliantly. Adventurous in form, enlightening in content and mesmerizingly mystical in feeling, it reproduces an unforgettable reality in which the dualism of `good’ and `evil’, `physics’ and `metaphysics’ is erased without a trace.

Author: Yann Martel
Published:  2001
Original language:  English
Literary Genre: Adventure, Psychological Romance, Contemporary Prose